1149

She sat at her brown desk, slaving away at yet another IB essay. A quick glance at the run-down alarm clock told her all she needed: 11:49. This is going to be another late-nighter. Sigh. Summatives.

Staring at the clock, battered by so many morning rages, she sat up slightly in her chair. That clock has been through so much with her. It was special, you see, for it had the extraordinary ability to make the usual tick-tock noise of a mechanical clock while flaunting the time on a modern digital display. Strange, isn’t it? The time-master. Amazing how attached she was to it, through the ages, until the soft ticking went in sync with her heartbeat. That little machine waltzed out a beat by which her life danced. 1149. Strange. Shouldn’t it have changed by now?

She tried to resume her reluctant composition. Threads of thought entangled within her brain so that only single hairs of ideas made themselves coherent. She stared at the page; this reminded all too painfully of chewing on a hairball. Control, A, Delete. No one needs to read your mess. She paused. She knew what should ensue: heaving a heavy sigh, resume writing – you’d rather cry, persevere – you want to try… Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Something was still. Not moving. Stationary. She stole a peek of the quietly ticking time-master. 1149.

She sat up straighter. Still? Something was so wrong. Surely, sixty seconds have passed by now. She listened: softly the melodic tick-tock of her clock flowed to her ears, unrelenting in its metronomic endeavors. And yet, the clock assured her: it was, still, 1149.

She could not concentrate. She could not get up. She could not even stretch her hand and give the stubborn 1149 clock a good, strong, shake. The sound of the irreverent tick-tock thundered over her ear-drums. Blood pulsed in her temples to this maddening beat. The clock’s ticks and tocks were rising to a crescendo of panic within her tired frontal lobe, this bizarre rite marked by the commandeering leer of the clock’s 1149.

What if aliens had taken over? Was this some clever ploy, some laboratorial experiment of intergalactic proportions? What if they trapped her in this moment indefinitely? What was she to do, deprived of all time and space, save one, uneventful minute full of panic and doubt? Surely, no sentient being was so vicious. This was really ridiculous. 1149. The windows of her soul saw no light save that issued by the red 1149, her memory forever branded with this secret code: 1149.

She was sick of it. Why couldn’t it show something – anything – other than this stupid 1149?!!!

Her head was pounding. Her heart beat so forcefully it was making her blood boil in her ears. The tick-tock-tick-tock of the unyielding clock pounded on her eardrum as if it mistook ‘ear’ to mean ‘bass’. Her being was ripping itself apart with terror, as unshed tears of fright tore at her lungs. She glared at the hanging digits: 1149, and there was nothing she could do. Look away, peer at it carefully, nothing was of use: 1149 hung like a death threat.

What if she never saw her family again? or her friends, trapped in this room, in this chair, in front of this clock, staring at this infernal essay? With something very much like prayer, she bashfully raised her head, to read, once more: 1149. She was really sick of it.

What if she went mad? How could she know? What could she do? She wasn’t mad – oh, no – not in the least. Her thoughts are racing, that’s all. Just prancing thoughts. Nothing – nothing at all – to worry about. And, anyway, who would be more normal than she? Nobody. Nothing and nobody. Quite. Still. 1149.

Taking a deep breath lest she should scare herself further, she heaved her heavy eyelids over her dilated pupils, took another deep breath, and forcefully calmed her rowdy imagination. Feeling better, she shot her eyes open. The clock read 11:49.

Were she to die, whether right here, right now – whatever now meant – or later; regardless, her time of death would forevermore be 11:49.

And, all the while, tick-tock-tick-tock passed with no change, no modification to that cruel 1149. Did you know it’s known as an odious number? Well, it was now clear why. The whole room seemed filled with the clock’s incessant noise. Her nerves were taut finer than the strings on a Stradivarius violin. Her heart would surely give out in this din. Her head was pounding from within. This was a nightmare, with her caught within. She closed her eyes, dropping a pen on the floor, she massaged her temples, she could not take anymore. She was ensnared within her panicked imagination. Outside, she knew, by some clever design, the number still shone: 1149.

She did not now how many eternal eternities passed in her sitting there like this, although they indubitably amounted to less than a full minute. Yet this would not do. She had to force herself for one final, fretful, frightful squint. With a blank brain, she stared straight ahead, searching for the clock’s display.

The digits added to the coveted IB number. She was safe.

******Afterthought: The last paragrpah's paragraph's addendum should be:

Glancing at her essay, she got up to catch some rest and finish it in the morning, barely seeing the title of the work: “On the importance of sleep.”

-----------------------OK, meaning:

For what seems like eternally forever (And I don't use hyperboles at all ) (... or sarcasm ), nothing has been posted and nobody has visited. So... the number of messages posted has been hanging at - you guessed it - 1149. And that made me mad. Not mad in the insane sense - I am very much sane (and like I said, not prone to sarcasm AT ALL), but just plain witch-drowning-in-her-own-potion angry. And I started forgeting how to type^. So I wrote a crappy story around this concept of STARING AT THE SAME NUMBER toa) CHANGE THE NUMBER OF MESSAGES!!! b) show that some people still visit c) maybe prompt visitors d) threaten that I can flood this forum with that kind of second-rate, done-in-under-half-hour stories unless people COMMENT e) Amuse myself

Oh, and odious numbers are numbers having an odd number of '1's in binary expansion, and opposite of evil numbers. <- .... How is THAT a geek?

Last edited by Owle Gray on Wed Jul 28, 2010 5:26 pm; edited 2 times in total

Hmmmm. I like it. It's intriguing. I... don't feel like going into detail right now, but I do like it.

One thing, though - maybe go have a look at consistency with verb tenses and narration? I felt like it was a little off at times. Please excuse my critical-ness. (Angela knows all about my obsessiveness with editing... >.>)

I'll have a go at critiquing this more thoroughly later, if you like. As well as writing more myself sometime soon

Tenses? If you mean past-present interplay, the present is meant to be an echo of her own thoughts. That's also when the narration changes. I do not want to italisize/highlight her thoughts because I find that is a cliche that would be demeaning to the reader if used here: you can figure out what her thoughts are from the change in tone/narration/tense, no need to spell it out.

Other than that... I read it over, I don't see it; do you have a specific instance in mind?

It was kind of... really... intense to the point where you can sort of feel it build until you break and become insane. I certainly hope you don't go insane.

I'll come back to this on the weekend, after the calc exam and give you some actual comments and like, analyze it literarily... is that a word? Regardless. I feel like a slug (an attractive slug). I don't want to do anything.

Personally, I haven't visited the forum in a while because I haven't been writing anything worth posting, and everything I have been writing is going straight into my anthology. The internet is not safe, so I have decided to keep the majority of it with me.